Love from Thought Leadership | Moshe Engelberg

Peter Winick

Using love with thought leadership to increase business.

An interview with Moshe Engelberg about changing the way we think about business for a more positive and profitable outcome.

Today’s guest is Moshe Engelberg, the founder, and CEO of ResearchWorks and author of The Amare Wave. The Amare Wave is an incredible book about breaking away from the old warlike paradigm in business to introduce love and outperform the completion.

Moshe explains the origin of the Amare Wave and the common things he found in a traditional business that made him realize the old ways were outdated. He explains how business tradition had a warlike paradigm of terms like “Crush the competition” and “Killing it”. Then, Moshe discusses how we are creating a resentful environment for employees and clients. Later, he talks about what he did to change the predatory language of business.

In addition, Moshe goes on to talk about how brands that are loved tend to build loyalty with their clients and loyalty can quickly turn to profits!

Also, some might think love isn’t a suitable word in business, but who doesn’t want people to love their company? Join the Amare Wave and watch your profits soar!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

The paradigm of business is changing. Is your thought leadership changing with it?
Thought leadership can often include words like love that make people uncomfortable, so sometimes you need to be able to use other words to get the same point across.
If people come to love your thought leadership, they will be loyal to your brand, and that will result in increased profits.

At Thought Leadership Leverage, we create innovative, meaningful organizational models that align with the core of your vision and build a foundation for growing your content. We can help you bring your vision to life. So, Contact Thought Leadership Leverage to learn how.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Moshe Engelberg, and he is the founder and CEO of Research Works. He has been in the consulting space for a long, long time. His focus is Business was Missing Love, which I think in many cases it still is, which means your job is not yet done. He was inspired to write a book which is really called the MRI Wave Uplifting Business by Putting Love to Work. That is that’s what we’re going to focus on. I mean, we can go into his degrees and all that sort of stuff, but I really want to just dive into the Amari wave and first off. Okay. So after many, many years as a consultant, it took you that long to realize there’s no love in the workplace? Or what was the coconut that fell on your head?

Moshe Engelberg Well, there were three things that converged, and it did take time. And maybe there were signals earlier that I didn’t pay enough attention to that. That happens to as humans. The three things were a powerful conversation with the client, really smart guy, pretty high up in a very large global medical technology company. And he said to me, Moshe, we hate our customers.

Peter Winick And I was right.

Moshe Engelberg And the choice of language was striking. And I knew it to be true for my work with them. There was just this, this. Unhappiness and this this resentment between them like, well, we’d rather go direct, direct consumers, but we have to go. Yeah, they were manufacturing these. So if you’re a middleman and really didn’t like it but. The curse, so to speak, was they made money. They could have made a lot more money had they not. Their customers. But that that resentment really got in the way of healthy relationships and maximizing the business opportunity. And I thought about a Peter and realized not a lot of people would say we hate our customers, but there’s often not a lot of love between companies and customers. They’re such ass and would be so much you said be so much easier if we just didn’t have to deal with our customers.

Peter Winick So remember the movie clerks from back in the day? You’re the two stoners in the video store and is the greatest job ever. Except we hate them.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, yeah.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, yeah. That’s kind of the point. So is that notion that it’s not unusual for there to be these bad feelings between. Companies and their customers and it’s can be pretty foundational. The second one was the predatory language of business. And I learned this early in my career. I was at Stanford getting my Ph.D. and deciding what career path do I want to take? Do I want to stay in academia? I want to go in consulting. I ended up doing some of both, so I had to feed an academic row to fit in the consulting world and was pretty busy for a while. And along the way I was looking at some of the bigger management consulting firms, McKinsey and so on. And at the time this was a few years ago, the vernacular was there’s two kinds of people we hire. They would say, we hire hunters and skinners, the hunters and business skinners do the work. And even at the time I was in my late 20s, if that’s bizarre, you’re just something weird about that idea. We talk about the people who give us money essentially as prey to be killed and skinned and bothered me. And then I sort of forgot and I got caught up in it. And I tell my own line saying, let’s capture who will help you capture our market share. We’ll help you. So we have this predatory language of we’re going to crush the competition, we’re going to destroy the annihilate them. The famous. Right.

Peter Winick We’re killing it.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re killing it. And this notion of subduing customers is how we win will bend them to our will. So in my book, I contrast the businesses war paradigm drawing on the Marine Corps and their modus operandi and business. And a lot of us function under this business war paradigm. It’s sort of fighting crush it till we destroy them to dominate.

Peter Winick But that comes if you if you go back on that, that comes directly out of, you know, the post World War two military industrial complex leaders that were successful in that domain, moving into the corporate domain and having that same ilk and mindset of what is the battle plan like. We didn’t have strategy. We had battle plans, right? Like and we didn’t crush that like exactly what you said. And I think the world changed, right? Or that just became an antiquated way of thinking, like, who wants to be get up and kill people every day?

Moshe Engelberg Like it is not fun and no one really enjoys it. Well, some people do, but most. Yeah, and you’re right that cycle.

Peter Winick Absolutely.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah. This military industrial complex. And we said, who can help us build railroads? Who can help us grow? Who can? It’s the military. They know how to do this kind of thing. So. So the languages and the cultures and, and the ways got conflated. Yeah. So, so I propose a business as love paradigm. And that’s where that realization business is missing. Love came in was that we had our customers idea where there was this contempt between companies and those they serve. The predatory language in the third was my own spiritual journey of recognizing we’re kind of at the core, we’re all kind of the same.

Peter Winick So I get that conceptually. And now how do you integrate that or how does that become the core of your business, right? So now you have to go out there and say, you know, you’re smart guy. I was a kid, so now you’re selling love to the business world. Like, what is how did that morph and transform and change your business?

Moshe Engelberg Well, it took a while and now I’m all in with it. Yeah. And the business model has shifted. I’ll talk about that in a moment. And well, first off, I want to say people don’t need to use the word love, so I talk to some pretty hardened conservative CEOs, and some of them are arms folded. Yeah. Like go back to California and hug a tree. What are you talking about? This is business. And then so I’m saying call it grilled cheese. I don’t care what you call it with the idea.

Peter Winick But let’s pause there for a minute, because I think and I’ve heard this before, not just in your content. So if you have a concept like emotional intelligence, write something in his new sometimes the words that are really the essence or the root or the core scared too many people away. And we have to sort of, like you said, call it a grilled cheese sandwich. I don’t care what you call it, but I think I love that your awareness to it, to say, geez. If I stuck with love, I’d probably. There’s a self-selection process that’s really limiting as a business. How do I sort of convert those that would lean in, but that word might repel them. And I think that’s a hard thing to do.

Moshe Engelberg It is. There’s and there’s a couple of ways I do that. One is I want to point out the name of the book is called The Amari Wave. Amari is Latin for Love. And a friend of mine gave me that suggestion. And somehow it has this it has this cachet to it. So I hear people go, hey, there’s the Amari man, and say, I never call myself that, but I like it. So Amari kind of frees people up from all the baggage that love has. And so that’s one things people called Amari and the more comfortable or again the grouchy sandwich. The other is to help people recognize that love belongs in business. And here’s how I do that. I say, Do you love, say, the Golden State Warriors, Pittsburgh Steelers, do some sports team or do you have enough burgers? Do you have an apple?

Peter Winick Whatever?

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, Apple people, people, virtually everyone will say yes to something. Yes. So then I point out, so as a customer, you’re saying it’s a good thing to love a company. So as a company, don’t you want to be loved by your customers? Don’t you want them to say, Yeah, I love whoever it is and say, Of course you do. So then how do you get so that’s a way to legitimize the idea of love and recognizing that it’s.

Peter Winick The banal, you know, you have to bridge it too. This isn’t just an abstract piece. There’s good business logic underneath that. So if Apple has customers that love them, which they do, and I’m just using them as an example, right? When they come up with a new product, guess what? They can charge more money for it. They know that there’s customers. They’re going to buy it. Remember the days of people lining up for the new iPhone? Pick a number and literally sleeping in the street, you know, to be the first in line to get the product. Like that’s love, man. Right. So love of equal loyalty, equal profits equals all that. So how do you how do you sort of take it full circle there? Because there’s an ROI to L-o-v-e, right?

Moshe Engelberg There Totally is. There totally is. And there’s lots there’s lots of research that shows that for one book, Firms of Endearment by Race, the sodium company Golden, 8 to 1, I’m looking at my numbers, an 8 to 1 return compared to the S&P over ten years. It’s like 1,000% versus about 120%. And there’s a lot. Yeah, Yeah, there is. So there’s a lot of empirical research that shows it. There’s also just the plain logic of, yeah, if people in my company are happy because we take good care of them and customers love us. Of course we’ll make more money. People change. We’re not just a commodity, so there’s different ways to approach that. Make the case for or why.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at Thought Leadership Leverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick So now I get it. And now explain to me then, how do I pay you for a lorry? What flavors does it come in? Who are you waving? Who are you? Who are you? Like, what does it look like? What are you doing and whom are you doing it for?

Moshe Engelberg Well, I appreciate the question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and clarifying it, because a colleague asked me recently, So who what’s the profile of your optimal clients? And I had kind of a mediocre, very few. I thought that wasn’t very good. I need to be clear about if I want a chip and I want to be clear about this. And so the ideal clients are there’s kind of two camps. One is people who are business leaders who are on this path now. They don’t have to call it love. It might be under servant leadership. It might just be under treating people well. The golden rule, whatever, that they’re on that path of. Yeah, we believe in treating people well. We know it’s not all about money. We know we have a more important purpose. And money is a really important byproduct. So they’re on that path, but they know something’s missing. They could be better and they may not know what it is. So they bring me they bring me in for this, a memory framework. And with it, they know I’ve consulted for years on organizational positioning, brand strategy, new product innovation.

Peter Winick But there is a self-selection piece, and I think it’s important to realize, Hey, I don’t want to be in the conversion business, right? You’re a relatively small business. You’re not 100,000 person organization where you couldn’t afford to nurture a certain client base for two years until they engage. So your choice was, wait a minute, what are the other things that would indicate that someone would be It’s almost like the Amazon algorithm. Well, like this. Like that’s when people are into conscious capitalism or beings, corporate social responsibility, etc. would have a higher propensity than maybe, you know, a bond trader or Goldman Sachs or something. Yeah.

Moshe Engelberg Exactly. And sometimes it’s just people who it’s in their DNA to treat people well and say, we care about people. The other group leaders, those who may not be there, that they’re frustrated or say, I’m worn out. I’ve been I’ve been waking up every day doing this and I make a lot of money and I’m have this company and I have that money, but I’m unhappy and I’m this and I don’t know what to do about it.

Peter Winick So it’s either, hey, I’m really into this or I hate this. Yes. So how do you find the cause? The first group my marketing brain starts to click on. Like I can find that. I can find that no time. How do I find the business leader? Because they have to have the authority, the budget, decision making ability, etc. That’s in essence having the equivalent of sort of the midlife crisis of the existential crisis in their career. How do you how do you know that? What are the patterns or indications that you know, you know, Fred over there’s his he’s having a moment.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, Well, it’s through networking, it’s through podcast, it’s through the usual vehicles. But it’s tapping into that emotional, that emotional piece of unhappiness. And people will often speak. So particularly men are more willing to speak to being frustrated or tired. Women are more open to say, speak to unhappiness per se. And so there’s usually ways people talk to it or they’ll receive that like that or touch them, that message. So it’s getting the message out through a lot of channels and going, This person I know who’s in that camp or know other people who are in the similar camp because it’s such a common problem and it’s the way we do business where we kind of reward people fighting, fighting, fighting and getting worn out. And we say, that’s good. That’s just so.

Peter Winick That’s that that sounds like a bit of a challenge to consistently find the right flow of those to drive a business is there. And because I’m a consultant, I think Matrix is right. So on the one hand there’s sort of personal unhappiness or frustration or call or call it what you will. And is there another end of the matrix that is situational? You know, hey, I just I got a new boss that I hate or we just downplay the things that are happening in the business world that might increase someone’s misery factor.

Moshe Engelberg Yes. Yeah. And a lot of it is situational, but situations over time lead to just plain getting worn out. And I don’t want more of this, but the specific situations, it could be M&A activity.

Peter Winick Diet.

Moshe Engelberg Downsizing. So there are events I can I can tap into and have my team work on. And you’re right, that is a harder reach than the first group is already. So yeah, we’re in this camp and there is what you alluded to before, there is the third group which I aspire to work with, and it’ll be tougher. And it’s the Ubers of the world who are built with the philosophy of crush and destroy with pretty much zero compassion and Wells Fargo, who keep.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Moshe Engelberg Getting into the news for reasons that are not good and Facebook with, with Cambridge Analytica. So if we.

Peter Winick Look at so I get that but so let’s take Uber for example the drug culture, all the icky stuff that was going on there. Right. It wasn’t till they, you know, their CEO and got some real deep crap that the board finally said enough. And they gave him several passes because the company was on fire. And then they said enough and he’s out. Right. So and that pattern tends to play itself out if there’s an external factor that puts the firm at risk, whether it’s publicly traded or pre-IPO IPO, whatever, how many companies before they got in trouble like that said, yeah, we’re ready to change, you know, use Facebook as an example or some others. Yeah, you know, Wells Fargo. Yeah, we know we’ve done some really bad things and we’re dishonest and we lie and steal and cheat. But until, you know, that’s kind of working for us. Like, do they ever wake up on their own and say, you know what? Yeah, we don’t want to be jerks anymore?

Moshe Engelberg Occasionally, but usually it’s getting in trouble.

Peter Winick Okay, So do you write them out to drive business? So like a tip line that you can do what?

Moshe Engelberg Well, well, speaking of tipping points, that that what I see happening is we have such divisiveness in in our country right now and in the world. And that creates a hunger for a better way. That’s not always that antagonism and the fighting. And I don’t mean this is a political statement as much as a statement of here’s what’s going on in our world and people, especially some in our generation or my generation, boomers, but also my kids, generation of millennials, I think particularly there and there’s a lot of leaders emerging from that cohort there who are saying, that’s bullshit. We don’t want that. We don’t want to live that way. So our bigger macro environment creates more of a hunger for this. There’s got to be something that’s more authentic, that feels better and will make us a lot of money.

Peter Winick Well, and I think, you know, we’re living in the age of transparency and Glassdoor and all that where, you know, I mean, there are plenty of companies out there that everybody knew that they were bad, but they’re really bad to work for. You been going to grind. Get out and you know you’re going to be a partner in a life, you know, whatever. And then those things start to come out and it’s like. Now it’s a problem for them to attract the right people, and then it comes out to the customers and say, Wait a minute, you know, like there’s an expectation we have a, let’s say a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods that partly why we go there is they’re you know, they’re aligned with my values. And we believe and we have reason to believe that they treat their people well. Right. Versus, you know, Walmart gets beat up.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah. There is a transparency. Some of it’s due to technology and so it’s harder to hide. It isn’t. So the next piece is for our culture to say we like this approach better. So my vision is the summary wave. I use the word wave to say it’s happening. There’s doing this is to name that make it a thing where it will attract momentum and more and more businesses to where there’s hundreds of thousands saying we’re an MRI company and they show it, they live it. That’s what I dream.

Peter Winick So it sounds like it’s the percentage of companies or people or leaders that are anti Ameri wave, probably small. There’s probably a large population that would embrace it, could embrace it, assuming they were exposed to it and it was explained to them in a non scary. Yeah that kind of jives with who I am and where we want to be. Or maybe a little bit aspirational. It seems like that’s the wave that you’re the visual blue wave I like. But that seems like the wave that it becomes something that someone wants to get on that wave.

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, exactly. And the after that semi after that I put a semicolons in and you’re likely to make more money.

Peter Winick Right. Well, and I think there are parallels in that in terms of socially conscious investing when it started as a big phenomenon 20, 25 years ago, the tradeoff was I’m a good person. I’m only going to invest in companies that do good things and I’m willing to pay a tax for that, meaning the returns that I expect of my investments will be, you know, whatever, 50 basis points lower. Things have changed and it is equal to or greater now. So now it’s like, wait, I can actually get a great return, be aligned to my values and I don’t have to be penalized for it. You know, and if you think about that seems to be a parallel trend to where you’re going or where you’re trying to take people to.

Moshe Engelberg It is it is it is flipping the logic. It’s flipping the state. So now the status quo is be more transactional or don’t focus on relationships and just get busy. It’s all business. And so it’s shifting by asking who doesn’t want their customers to love them? Who doesn’t want to improve them? Right, Right. So flipping that where that becomes a status quo and the outliers become doing business the other way.

Peter Winick So you almost make the aspirational, the default.

Moshe Engelberg Exactly.

Peter Winick Yeah. Well, this has been great move. Create your time. Any final no pressure, but words of wisdom for anyone sort of on this journey or thinking about, yeah, I got a thing and I want to do something more with it. Any final wisdom there?

Moshe Engelberg Yeah, a couple of things. One is I would say you can do this and there’s some people say, How do I get started? There’s simple ways to get started. For example, have a conversation with your colleagues. Ask yourself, Do we love our customers? Do they love us back? That’s a very powerful starting point. And again, don’t get hung up on the word love. Have fun with it. Call with it, call it whatever you want and recognize there’s really small steps and the rewards can come pretty quickly. I can help if people want to contact me, they can. And I book lots of stuff on my website. Yeah, let’s go forward.

Peter Winick Great. Well, I appreciate your time. Thanks. Thanks for sharing your experience with us today. Appreciate it. Yeah, a great.

Moshe Engelberg Fan with you, Peter. Thank you for what you do appreciate.

Peter Winick Thanks. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.